Marketing Tips

Don't Require Visitors to Use a GPS in Order to Navigate Your Site - Flash navigations are the kiss of death for strong onsite SEO. Navigation should be text and HTML based. Also the navigation tabs should live on the top of the page.

Kelly Cutler — Co Founder and CEO — Marcel Media

Ideally, every point of contact must communicate and reinforce the identity of the brand, for there to be a consistent brand image. An organization's employees, among others are an integral brand contact point, and this underscores the pertinence of internal branding/marketing to ensure their full buy-in into brand values and objectives.

Tomi Ogunlesi — Senior Strategic Planner — Bates Cosse

To make an indelible impression in your customer's mind amongst the flurry of activity around them, your brand must be reliable, steady, dependable, constant, unwavering, unfailing, and lasting - all words synonymous with consistent.

Emily Griebel — Integration Architect — McKee Wallwork Cleveland

Look, part of growing a business means you have ups and downs. Some marketing campaigns are more successful than you anticipate and some are less. Some are utter failures. Some are out-of-the-park home runs.
Thatís the way it is.

Michelle Pariza Wacek — Owner — Creative Concepts and Copywriting LLC

The content of your site is much more important than the design. Yes, you should have a professional-looking site, but a brilliant design and dazzling graphics won't pay off anywhere near as well as a clear explanation of why a client should work with you. Useful material such as articles, assessments, and other samples of your expertise will go much further to persuade prospective clients than flash intros and interactive menus.

The promise of the social web is juicy and inspiring and confounding. Be interesting. Be smart. Work like a maniac. Create value and your customers will find you. Itís a socially brushed off sequel to ďBuild it and they will comeĒ. But even interesting becomes noisy and ineffective without context and connection.

Arnold Waldstein — CEO — Waldstein Consulting

One of the worst things you can do for onsite SEO is to ignore your title tags. Take the time to show your title tags some TLC. Every page on your Web site should have a unique title tag. They should be specific to the page content, engaging, and inspire people to click through or, even better, link to you.

Kelly Cutler — Co-Founder and CEO — Marcel Media

Decisions based on instinct can have as much chance for success as those based on data.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

Wilson C. Kadlec — SEO Expert

It is entirely possible to utilize promotional products to generate buzz about your brand without fully explaining the details of your business idea, and intellectual property protection may provide additional defense against untrustworthy individuals. Much of the value of a business directly correlates to its intellectual capital and it would be a shame to witness a startup attempt fail due to inadequate safeguarding of ideas.

Dana Udwin — Team Lead of Social Media — Pinnacle Promotions

Although a strong call to action is not something many business owners put in their card, if you do this you are taking advantage of a big opportunity for your business. Keep in mind that this could be your first and last chance to get your target customers to look at your card, so you need to make it good.

Lynne Saarte — Author

LinkedIn Company Pages are a great platform to showcase your company and its products. With the massive amount of professionals using LinkedIn, itís just a matter of time before this relatively new feature really kicks off. I highly recommend setting up a Company Page for your business if you havenít already!

Patrick Soules — Member Benefits Director — ASM

If you employ people to work in your store, it is absolutely essential that they are friendly and helpful towards customers. Nothing will give a customer a negative impression of your store - and thereby create an unhappy customer - than having a disinterested, unprofessional looking kid "greeting" them as they enter. Take the time to interview as many candidates as you need to until you find the right kind of people, and invest in paying those good candidates enough to make them want to stay. The cost will be made up in the number of loyal customers you cultivate with your positive employees.

Andrew Michaels — Author

Monitoring and managing your search engine rankings, especially on Google is necessary if you wish to increase the organic traffic to your website. This begins with basic monitoring and evaluation of your rankings on key search engines.